Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Small World: The Way We Were

Who among us has not occasionally longed to travel back in time?

For example, what if you could ride a dinosaur? Or witness the signing of the Declaration of Independence? Or ride a dinosaur through the signing of the Declaration of Independence and upload video of your stunt to YouTube, which you now own, because you have a time machine, and you can do anything you want and the world is now a twisted product of your perverse whims, and the ensuing paradoxes are tearing the very fabric of the universe asunder? Or maybe this has already happened and what we perceive as "reality" is merely the construct of someone who has had or will have or will have had had a time machine and used it to meddle with history, and because of this we have no control whatsoever over our own destiny and merely dwell in a self-perpetuating perdition of temporal contradictions?

Fine, so maybe time travel isn't all that great. Still, at least you can safely experience what it would be like to travel way back to the year Two Thousand And Aught Seven, Anno Domini, thanks to a Canadian periodical called "The Glo Bean D Mail," which contains the following article forwarded to me by a reader:

Ah yes, 2007. People "boogied" to the sounds of Incubus and The Red Hot Chili Peppers. Audiences thrilled to movies like "Wild Hogs" and "Norbit." And newspapers printed articles about "fixies" which contained passages like this:

Popularized by bike couriers as a fast, simple way to charge around town, the fixie has become the ride of choice for young downtown cyclists – a personal statement and urban art form in one.

Amazingly though, the above words were not published in 2007. They were actually published yesterday(!), in the aforelinked "Glo Bean D Mail" article. So, too, were these:

Some come with stubby, shortened handlebars to make it easier to squeeze between cars. Some have swooping ram’s-horn bars of gleaming chrome, stripped of all handlebar tape. Others have wheel rims made of bright anodized aluminum in pink or gold. Still others have snappy whitewall tires. The latest thing is to have a coloured bicycle chain to match the bike’s colour scheme. A leather seat by Brooks, the storied English saddle maker, often tops things off.

After reading this, I have three questions for the writer, none of which has anything to do with "fixies:"

1) What's it like to be cryogenically frozen for four years and did it hurt when they thawed you out? (Okay, that's technically two questions, but whatever.)

2) Are you bummed you didn't get to see "Avatar" in the theater?

3) Michael Jackson died. How crazy is that?!?

Of course, those of us who have actually had to live through the past four years know how it all went down: first came the fixie fad; then the fixie scene closed; then all the fixie scenesters discovered bikes with gears and reinvented themselves as insufferable pedants. It was, in a word, horrible. But I guess it all seems perfectly delightful when you missed the whole thing because you're the Rip Van Winkle of the "bike culture:"

Still, the rise of the fixie is a healthy sign of a maturing bike culture in the city. Like high-school kids, urban cyclists are dividing into tribes. The nerds are the guys with panniers and reflecting vests; the jocks are the road-bike riders in spandex; the artsies ride vintage women’s bikes with flowers in the basket; the fixie riders, of course, are the cool kids.

Wrong. Wrong! They're all nerds. Have you really not figured that out yet? Or do you still have freezerburn on your brain?

You boarded the LIRR at Oyster Bay on Sunday evening with your bicycle, an interesting hat, and a copy of the Economist. I was the girl with a gray tank top and dirty blonde wavy hair, jabbering with my Irish friend, but too tongue-tied to talk to you. Did your bike survive the fall?

I've ridden the Long Island Railroad countless times and I've never seen anybody even remotely that pretentious. It must be a North Shore thing. A bicycle? Sure. An interesting hat? Possibly. A copy of the Economist? Perhaps. But all three at once? That's almost as impressive as a guy with a Swedish military bike and a weary Portuguese friend! But the big question is:

So was the hat that interesting, or was it just "beer hat" interesting? Actually, maybe that's the guy she saw on the train. If so, I'm glad to have helped.

Speaking of pretension, I was reading the July 25th issue of The New Yorker recently and there was an article about "tiny houses:"

Evidently, there is a growing subculture of people who are into tiny houses, and it appears to be the next evolutionary phase of minimalism:

The occupants of tiny houses tend to be committed, and slightly self-regarding, citizens, who cook on little stoves and have refrigerators like wall safes. They shed years of possessions and keepsakes to get by with two shirts and two pairs of pants and two mugs and two forks, in order to occupy what amounts to a monk's cell, for the sake of simplicity, frugality, or upright environmental living. They often embody the zeal of religious converts.

And because shacks are too "Hatfields and McCoys" for minimalists, and cottages are too "Grimm's Fairy Tales," they've invented a new form of pretentious dwelling that splits the difference:

They aren't toys or playhouses or aesthetic gestures--a copy of Monticello as a sandbox in a field in East Hampton, say--and they aren't shacks or cottages, either. Shacks don't have kitchens and bathrooms, and a cottage is larger than a tiny house.

In other words, a tiny house is basically an artisanal mobile home, and people pay up to $54,000 for them:

The tiniest house that Tumbleweed Tiny House Company sells is the XS-House, which is sixty-five square feet, and costs sixteen thousand dollars to build yourself, or thirty-nine thousand dollars if Tumbleweed or someone else builds it for you. Tumbleweed's most expensive house, the Fencl, is a hundred and thirty square feet; it costs twenty-three thousand dollars to build yourself and fifty-four thousand dollars to have built.

Of course, the tiny house movement is a reaction to the McMansions and jumbo mortgages and bursting bubbles and crushing financial burdens that characterize life in modern-day America:

According to Greg johnson, the publisher of a tiny-house Web site called ResourcesForLife.com, to inhabit a tiny house "you have to remodel your sense of what success is and how important it is to you to convey to the outside world 'Hey, I have a big house and big car and I'm successful.' If you have a piece of inner tranquillity, you don't have to prove anything to anybody."

I can certainly understand that people want to liberate themselves from excess and live more modestly, manageably, and efficiently. To that end, I've come up with a revolutionary idea. Imagine if, instead of living in garden sheds, people lived in sort of "tiny house collectives"--large structures containing multiple tiny houses within their walls. Not only would such structures be more efficient than single-family dwellings, but they would also foster a sense of community and even allow for cooperative ownership arrangements. We could call these tiny houses "apartments," and we could call the tiny house collectives "apartment buildings."

Now, imagine multiple "apartment buildings" in close proximity to each other, and the dynamic communities that would result--hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people living in tiny houses and sharing ideas and experiences and creating economies and forming governments. I haven't come up with a catchy name for these communities yet, but I'm thinking either "cities," or else "people nuggets." Then, if for some reason you decide you actually need or want more living space than the people nugget contains, you can just leave it and move into a normal fucking house.

Unfortunately though, tiny house minimalists can't seem wrap their minds around the concept of living in a place that suits their needs. Instead, it makes much more sense to them to live in a miniature version of the McMansion that offends them so much, possibly with one of these on their microscopic front porch:

(America 2.0: Tiny Houses and Tiny SUVs)

In other words, the minimalist/tiny house ideal seems to be to return to the way life was back in the Middle Ages by transforming America into a land of fiefdoms dotted with designer hovels in which the inhabitants have no equity.

I predict pillows for cyclists will reach prices of up to $5,000 in the next few years, after which urban cyclists will reject pillows and begin sleeping without any sort of head support at all and we'll start seeing articles about a new "fixed-head sleeping movement," and about how some of these crazy urban sleepers are even running their beds blanketless.

Hey Snob, remember that the Glo Bean is in Toronto, and catching up with Canada's undercarriage is often a delayed process for us poor Canucks. Back to the Future only just came out here. It was awesome and made your time travel comments very poignant for me as a thinking, philosophical kind of reader.

I have 57 tiny houses to keep my stuff in, but now I'll either have to get another or throw out a pair of socks so I can get one of those bicycle pillows. My bike's been complaining about a sore neck ever since I got it.

It is a rather sad fact that Toronto (home of the the Glo Bean D Mail) is temporally locked in to Brooklyn circa 4 years prior. But its also rather common knowledge here. The reader who flagged the fixie article for you was no doubt aware of this and using his or her knowledge of the temporal phenomenon to ride their dinosaur through your blog :)

I read an article in Coastal Living magazine (yes, I am a subscriber -- I do have interests outside of cycling)about a new trend of buying a couple of old shipping containers and building an inexpensive makeshift beach house out of them.

Why spend 54 thou on a glorified lean-to? People build them in the slums of Sao Palo and Mumbai for considerably less money, I can assure you.

As someone who has resided in such a place I gotta tell you, trailer parks aren't actually that bad. Ours was a 2 bedroom, 2 bath with a living room, a kitchen, a 2-car carport, and a storage shed. Maybe we'd really have found nirvana in a Tiny House, but the trailerhood seemed to work fine.

I know a few people that live in "tiny house collectives" that you have described. They do have a simple lifestyle, and have little to want for. You can call them minimalist, I'll continue to refer to them as convicted felons.

That so-called "tiny house" has wheels. By traveling back in time, I have discovered that in the Dark Ages, otherwise known as the 1950s, when there was an amateur golfer who sometimes pretended to be a general who got elected president, lots of people, including my grandparents, had tiny houses on wheels, and they would live in them for literally days on end in places adjacent to or even within the boundaries of what were then known as "National Parks," which were patrolled by friendly bears dressed as park rangers and reminding our grandparents to "Give a Hoot--Don't Pollute." But the Grands called their tiny houses "travel trailers." Shows you how unhip they were!

I was at a friend's bike store today and he showed me a bike that a client had built up. Supposedly cost 22k, but it weighed only 12 pounds. All black. I understand that I should mock the dentist or hedge funder that is buying it, but man was it sexy.

Course, if I did have 22k laying around, I could buy a XS-House, build it myself, a sweet Giant road bike, another single speed mountain bike, another old car, and still have money left over for a funky hat.

I signed up for Twitter when it first launched in 2006 — because it was big tech news and everyone I knew who knew anything about the Internet jumped on. But I didn’t understand the tool at all until September 2009.

I was sitting alone in my room in Portland. My yoga mat was rolled out on the floor in the middle of the carpeted floor. The room smelled like old carpet and incense. I’d been sitting, practicing, and watching the rain fall outside my window. A single street light always shined through a large maple tree in front of my shared apartment on the 2nd floor of a small house.

A month before I’d quit my job in New York, thrown everything I could carry into a backpack, and hopped onto a plane from New York to Portland without a plan.

I’d started a blog called Far Beyond The Stars. I wanted to get the word out about my work, but I didn’t know how.

I was experimenting with Twitter, but it wasn’t quite working for me. I didn’t know who to reach out to, and why I should care at all.

Then I read Seth Godin’s Tribes at Powell’s as I sipped a coffee and watched hipsters walk by in the rain.

It's a tiny town, you can hang around with meIt's a tiny town, and ev'rybodyknows what you been doin'So don't you mess around,'cause it's a tiny town,Teeny weeny town, tiny town, tiny townAnd ev'ry little town, if you look aroundIs a tiny town, tiny town, tiny town

Be careful my darlin'What you say and doThe shit that you makeComes right back to you

And the whole wide world is a tiny townFull of tiny ideasWith each tiny heart pumpin' up and downCome be tiny with me

Such a tiny town, but we havetrouble livin' with each otherSome would knock you downAnd someone else would liketo steal your loverIt's a tiny town and it's enough tomake you lose your mind[ Find more Lyrics on http://mp3lyrics.org/Ify ]Mother nature says - she won't play that waySo quit your cryin'

Mama still loves youWhen you go astrayYou don't need to pushHer in her grave

In my tiny mind you are tiny tooI'll be tiny tonightFor each tiny me there's a tiny youClose your tiny town eyes

And the birds sweetly singingIn the tiny town treesAnd the animals ask what you're doin'Well it's as plain as can be

I see your sadnessLike birds in the airI see them allFlying away

In each tiny heart in this tiny worldIs a tiny desireAnd each tiny boy and each tiny girlClose their tiny town eyes

And the whole wide world is a tiny townFull of tiny ideasWith our tiny hearts pumpin' up and downCome be tiny with me

Speaking of passe news, this tiny house stuff has been around for years. The New Yorker just discovered that ancient topic?

Speaking of time travel, I do that on an annual basis. No, seriously! I live in Japan and depart Tokyo airport at around 1:00 PM on, say, a Friday, and I arrive at 7:00 AM ON THAT SAME FRIDAY in San Francisco. I get to relive 6 hours of my life (not counting the 8 hours I'm in the air in what I guess is a sort of limbo). Of course, I lose a day going back, details, details...

Snob, I was wondering how long it would take before you said a little something about this newish take on the small dwelling. I feel I should point out that many of the people attracted to this idea would not want to live in one of your fanciful People Nuggets because they would also want a little plot of land where they could grow some food, contemplate and interpret water musically and assemble letter bombs. Which reminds me, what is so bad about being a peasant in a small scale artisanal fiefdom of yore? It's just like being a peasant in today's world of mega corporate fiefdoms, but with pitchforks.

Truth be told, my wife and I were weighing up the pros and cons of trailer homes, retrofitted shipping containers and glorified sheds just yesterday, so it is quite amusing that you cover this topic today. No firm conclusions were reached, but I am going to jump the gun and order myself an Apocalyspork. The titanium is sourced from military and aerospace scrap, so not only is it minimalist and post apoCadelypse compliant, but it is also environmentally friendly.

Toronto is temporally locked in to Brooklyn circa 4 many years prior. But its also instead common information here. When we play the WOW, we need to try get the WOW Gold Cheap,thst's to say, spend less money, do we have any good way to Buy WOW Gold from trust friends or some way else? When we have that we can play the game becomes more quickly and update the levels more easy.

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Remember that the Glo Bean is in Toronto, and catching up with Canada's undercarriage is often a delayed process for us poor Canucks. Back to the Future only just came out here. It was awesome and made your time travel comments very poignant for me as a thinking, philosophical kind of reader.

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About Me

While I love cycling and embrace it in all its forms, I'm also extremely critical. So I present to you my venting for your amusement and betterment. No offense meant to the critiqued. Always keep riding!